1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for generation/presentation of program-related contents that generate program-related contents to be distributed to a portable terminal from a program video and program-related information that is relevant to this program video along the progress of a program, under a mobile environment of receiving a text, a still picture, and a motion picture by utilizing a portable terminal such as a portable telephone and a PDA. More specifically, this invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for generation/presentation of program-related contents that generate and present program-related contents, by efficiently presenting a large quantity of information during a short period of time with a simple operation, even when a portable terminal having a small display area and with low manipulability is used.
2) Description of the Related Art
In recent years, there has been a rapid progress in the distribution of portable terminals including portable telephones. According to a next-generation portable terminal (IMT 2000) that is currently being operated on a trial basis, this portable terminal can receive motion pictures as well as texts and still pictures by using a network band of a maximum 384 Kbps. It has been considered it possible to install a high-level function of voice reading onto this portable terminal.
As a system using such portable terminals, there has been a service of generating and transmitting program-related contents such as a quick report on a baseball or soccer game. Following the occurrence of an event such as a scoring, or an inning end, a service provider prepares a character string like “The bottom of the first inning, Giant 3-1 Hiroshima, Giant came from behind with Y. Takahashi's timely hit”, and transmits this mail to user's portable terminals. Based on this service, a user who cannot watch television during moving can know the progress of the program. At present, a character string is a main form of information transmitted by this service. It is expected that, in the near future, more sophisticated form of information will be transmitted such as motion pictures, data of an existing database, and a page of a relevant Web site.
For example, a baseball program is considered to have various kinds of program-related information such as occurrence events of a hit, an HR (homerun), scores, SBO (a strike, a ball, an out), a safe base status, a player's profile, cumulative number of turns at bat, a digest scene, a page of a relevant Web site, etc. These pieces of information are related to each other, and it is possible to express a structure of this relationship as shown in FIG. 10. A quick report on the game that shows this tree structure corresponds to the program-related contents. All nodes after a start of the game (for example, an occurrence event, a digest, a relevant Web) correspond to the program-related information.
Presentation of the above information to portable terminals has following problems. That is,    (1) As a portable terminal has a small display area, presentable information is limited.    (2) When a portable terminal is used, a user can carry out only a minimum interaction. Therefore, it is difficult to view around the information structure.    (3) A function that can present as much information as possible during a short period of time is necessary.    (4) When a level of information becomes higher, information that is different for each user becomes necessary.
As a measure to solve the above problems (1) and (2), a passive viewing of programmed program-related information (a generation of program-related contents) is considered. For example, when a user views the scenes as shown in FIG. 10 on a portable terminal, it is considered more suitable to passively view scenes as programmed scenes of information than to actively view the scenes. This is because the portable terminal has a small display area, and a user's interaction is limited. If a user is to actively view the scenes in a high-level structure as shown in FIG. 10, the user must continue viewing on the small screen of the portable terminal for a long time, and must repeat the button manipulation frequently. This is painful for the user.
As a measure to solve the above problems (3) and (4), it is necessary to provide a function that can prepare contents effectively and efficiently to enable each user to sequentially view desired scenes of information in a desired order within a short period of time such as one minute or three minutes. It is said that, in general, not more than three minutes is suitable for a user to watch data on the portable terminal. This is because as the form of information becomes more sophisticated, more personalized information becomes necessary. Particularly, there is an extremely large difference in the preference of a sport program between users. Therefore, each user wants information different from what the other users want.
For example, assume that the player Takahashi of Giant hit HR in a game between Giant and Hiroshima. For the users who like Takahashi, information relating to Takahashi is important, and they want to have information relating to Takahashi such as “cumulative number of turns at bat”, “record in this season”, “relevant Web information”, etc.
On the other hand, for Hiroshima fan users, the information on Takahashi is not necessarily important. Therefore, for these users, more information about “pitch status” of Hiroshima pitchers, “digest” up to the current time, and the team's “relevant Web information” are effective, instead of the information on Takahashi. In order to present these pieces of information as a short-time program (program-related contents) of one minute to three minutes on the portable terminals, it is necessary to automatically extract information that is important for each user, and efficiently and sequentially present the information in the order each user wants. In other words, in order to program program-related information and generate program-related contents for the portable terminals, it is necessary to provide a function that reflects individual users' preferences, and automatically generates a short-time program containing various contents.
There are relevant conventional techniques as follows.    1) “Kondo”, Hiroyuki Kondo, Akiyo Nadamoto, Katsumi Tanaka, A Restructuring and Presentation of an Output Result of a Search Engine in a Mobile Environment, Summer Database Workshop 2000 (DBWS 2000), pp. 199-206 (2000).    2) “Sumiya”, Kazutoshi Sumiya, Nobuhiro Ikega, Kuniaki Uehara, A Reading Support according to Dynamic Abstract of WebSkimming WWW Page Group, The Eleventh Data Engineering Workshop (DEWS' 00) Preparatory Draft CD-ROM (2000).    3) “Uma”, Tsuyoshi Uma, Kazutoshi Sumiya, Katsumi Tanaka, An Information Filtering that takes into account Time Series for a Broadcasting type Information Distribution System, Information Processing Academy Paper Database (TOD7) Vol. 41, No. SIG6, pp. 46-57 (2000).    4) “Hashi 00”, T. Hashimoto, Y. Shirota, A. Iizawa, and H. S. Kunii, Personalized Digests of Sports Programs using Intuitive Retrieval and Semantic Analysis, Proc. of ER200 19th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, October 9-12, Salt Lake City, USA (2000).    5) “Hashi 01”, T. Hashimoto, Y. Shirota, A. Iizawa, and H. Kitagawa, A Rule-based Scheme to make Personal Digests from Video Program Meta Data, Proc. of Dexa2001, September 3-7, Munich, Germany (2001)(to appear).    6) “Shiro”, Y. Shirota, A. Iizawa, and H. Kitagawa, A TV Program Generation System Using a Digest of Video Scenes and a Scripting Markup Language, Proc. of HICCS2001 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 3-6, Hawaii, USA (2001).    7) “Shirota”, Yukari Shirota, Takako Hashimoto, Atsushi Iizawa, An Event Drive type Data Broadcasting Program-Related Information Preparation System, DBWeb 2000, pp. 97-104 (December, 2000).    8) “Hashimoto 00”, Takako Hashimoto, Yukari Shirota, Hiroko Mano, Atsushi Iizawa, A Digest Viewing System in TV Receiving Terminal, Information Processing Academy Paper, Database (TOD6) Vol. 41, No. SIG3, pp. 71-84 (2000).    9) “Hashimoto 01”, Takako Hashimoto, Yukari Shirota, Akiyo Nadamoto, Taeko Hattori, Atsushi Iizawa, Katsumi Tanaka, Kazutoshi Sumiya, A TV Program Generation System based on Digest Video Scenes and Markup Language, Information Processing Academy Paper, Database (TOD8) Vol. 42, No. SIG1, pp. 117-130 (2001).
In “Kondo”, Kondo and others considered that a passive viewing type presentation system is more suitable than an active type presentation on a portable terminal that has a small display area and has a small opportunity of interaction. Therefore, they proposed a WebCarrousel system that presents a search result on the Web in the Carrousel system as a programmed component. This system is effective for a user to passively views a large quantity of information obtained based on a searching of the Web, on the portable terminal. However, this system does not reflect users' preferences in presenting the information, and does not take into account a programming according to a link circulation when there is a strong relationship between the information like the program-related contents.
In “Sumiya”, Sumiya and others proposed a method of presenting information in a stream, by detecting a master page common to each page from a result of searching the Web, and providing a series of flow to the searched result. This system places importance on the determination of a presentation order based on a relationship that common master pages are the same. However, this system does not take into account a determination of a presentation order and a scenario generation that reflect users' preferences.
In “Uma”, Uma and others proposed a system of presenting information by calculating a degree of freshness of Web information and a scoop level, and filtering the information based on these values. However, this system does not take users' preferences into account either.
On the other hand, the applicants of the present invention have so far proposed systems that present high-level and structured program-related contents. These systems place an emphasis on how to restructure and present program-related contents according to users' preferences and characteristics of information.
For example, the applicants of the present invention have so far proposed a “personalized digest preparation system” according to individual users' preferences by utilizing metadata of television programs like baseball and soccer, in “Hashi 00”, “Hashi 01”, and “Hashimoto 00”. This system extracts scenes having an organized meaning from basic and objective program metadata, calculates levels of importance of occurred events by reflecting users' preference information, and prepares a digest by selecting scenes in the order of high importance levels.
In “Shiro” and “Hashimoto 01”, the applicants of the present invention have proposed a “program generation system using digest scenes” that automatically generates a program for each user, from digest scenes generated by the above personalized digest preparation system. This system has devised a program definition language called ppml (Personalized Program Markup Language). Based on this, the system describes components of virtual characters and program metaphors to generate a program, and stores the components into a database as an operation template. The system automatically generates a program by selecting an operation template that is optimum for each digest scene. A program that is finally output is also described in the ppml. This system can control different elements of videos and character strings, and realize a flexible generation of a program.
In “Shirota”, the applicants of the present invention considered that, in order to put a data broadcasting service into practical use in a digital broadcasting, it is necessary to automatically generate data that is relevant to a program. Therefore, the applicants proposed “A Program-Related Contents Preparation System for Data Broadcasting” that dynamically generates program-related contents from program metadata.
However, according to the above conventional techniques, it has not been possible to provide a system that satisfies all the above requirements (1) to (4) that become the problems when the portable terminal receives program-related contents.
In other words, according to the above conventional techniques, in a method of and an apparatus for generation/presentation of program-related contents that generates program-related contents to be distributed to a portable terminal from a program video and program-related information that is relevant to this program video along the progress of a program, under a mobile environment of receiving a text, a still picture, and a motion picture by utilizing a portable terminal such as a portable telephone and a PDA, there has not been provided a method or an apparatus that enables users to passively view information personalized for each user without a complex interaction in a limited display area of each portable terminal and that enables each user to view desired information in a desired order.